To Wait Upon Your Word: A Response toPsalm 62

Psalm 62 seems a particularly appropriate psalm to read and pray through during Advent, a season of waiting, of prayerful anticipation, for the psalm opens:

1. MY SOUL truly waiteth still upon God: for of him cometh my salvation.

2. He verily is my strength and my salvation: he is my defence, so that I shall not greatly fall.

And so in my poem, which will appear in my next book David’s Crown, I allude obliquely to the title of my current Advent Book Waiting On The Word:

Draw back the veil until my spirit sings
And teach me how to wait upon your word,
Content beneath the shadow of your wings,

Gathering strength in you

The psalm makes a clear and simple contrast between the certain strength we find in God, and the wavering uncertainties of the world, which is compared to a tottering wall and a broken hedge. This is true as far as it goes but of course the Christian praying this psalm brings another insight to bear: this world for all its brokenness and vanity is still the world that God so loved that he gave his only son to save it. So we must learn  to love it with him, and long for its redemption, even as we try not to be snared in the traps and trappings of its present fallen state, and that is the balance and paradox I seek to explore in my poetic response.

As always you can hear me read the psalm by clicking on the play button or the title.

These poems will all be gathered together and published on January 30th under the title David’s Crown. I am just working on the proofs now and there is already an amazon page for the book if you wish to pre-order it Here

LXII Nonne Deo?

Draw back the veil until my spirit sings
And teach me how to wait upon your word,
Content beneath the shadow of your wings,

Gathering strength in you, until I’ve heard
The word that sends me back into the world
With all its tottering walls, with all its scarred

And ruined landscapes, raggèd flags unfurled,
Its broken promises, and compromises,
The world you love and suffer for, the world

You lift to God, the world that still devises
Its own destruction, in its vanity
Selling its living soul for passing prizes.

I am to love this world as tenderly
As you do, to risk everything for love,
For love lifts time into eternity.

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O Radix, A Third Advent Reflection and Sonnet

Image by Linda Richardson

The third Advent antiphon,in my Advent Anthology from Canterbury Press Waiting on the Word,  O Radix, calls on Christ as the root, an image I find particularly compelling and helpful. The collect is referring to the image of he ‘tree of Jesse the family tree which leads to David, and ultimately to Christ as the ‘son of David, but for me the title radix, goes deeper, as a good root should. It goes deep down into the ground of our being, the good soil of creation. God in Christ, is I believe, the root of all goodness, wherever it is found and in whatsoever culture, or with whatever names it fruits and flowers, a sound tree cannot bear bad fruit said Christ, who also said, I am the vine, you are the branches. I have tried to express some of my feelings for Christ as root and vine more elliptically in my song the Green Man, but here I do it more directly in my sonnet on the third advent antiphon. You can hear me read this poem by clicking on the title or the play button. The image above was created by Linda Richardson. She Writes:

This is the last of my attempts with the Chinese brush, but once again the original text is visible behind the great ’O’. Malcolm invites us to imagine the Root of Jesse as ‘the stock and stem of every living thing whom once we worshipped in the sacred grove’, and I wonder if you too hear our ancestors, calling us back to a vision of the earth as being our sacred home. I hear an invitation to reconnect to our roots, to know ourselves as part of the great Creation.

 

You can find you can find a short reflective essay on this poem in Waiting on the Word, which is now also available on Kindle

the tree of Jesse a carving in the Louvre

O Radix

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, standing
as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer

O Radix

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,

Rose from a root invisible to all.

We knew the virtues once of every weed,

But, severed from the roots of ritual,

We surf the surface of a wide-screen world

And find no virtue in the virtual.

We shrivel on the edges of a wood

Whose heart we once inhabited in love,

Now we have need of you, forgotten Root

The stock and stem of every living thing

Whom once we worshiped in the sacred grove,

For now is winter, now is withering

Unless we let you root us deep within,

Under the ground of being, graft us in.

 

If you would like to encourage and support this blog, you might like, on occasion, (not every time of course!) to pop in and buy me a cup of coffee. Clicking on this banner will take you to a page where you can do so, if you wish. But please do not feel any obligation!